


Know When To Fold 'em: "Three of a Kind" and the Very Bitter End of X-Files's Season Six

by PlaidAdder



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Field Trip, Gen, Lone Gunmen - Freeform, Meta, Nonfiction, biogenesis, harsh realm - Freeform, jumping the shark, millennium - Freeform, season six, spinoffs, three of a kind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-29
Updated: 2014-07-29
Packaged: 2018-02-10 22:53:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2043324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What makes “Three of a Kind” a prophet of doom is that it’s the "Assignment: Earth" of the X-Files.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Know When To Fold 'em: "Three of a Kind" and the Very Bitter End of X-Files's Season Six

So here’s a picture of Mulder turning into a pile of disgusting and lethal mucus. Which is sort of how I feel about where this show is headed as it rounds the turn into season seven.

I actually have no problem with the episode “Field Trip,” from which this image was captured. Despite its crazy premise, I’ve always liked “Field Trip” for what it says about Mulder and Scully’s long strange trip from opposition to synthesis. Though he has kind of a snit fit at the beginning of the episode in which he rants about the fact that she still shoots down his initial theories even though he’s been “right 98 percent of the time”—he’s right; the show validates his worldview much more than it validates hers—Mulder realizes, during his mushroom-induced hallucination, the same thing that Scully realizes during hers: he doesn’t believe in, and doesn’t want to live in, a universe where his perspective is the only one that’s ever right. Each of them is profoundly disturbed by the thought that s/he has finally “won” the argument and brought the other one around to his/her way of thinking. (It is interesting that whereas in Mulder’s hallucination, Scully is converted by her alien encounter, the only way the mushroom can represent the victory of Scully’s worldview is by skeletonizing poor Mulder; even the giant mushrooms know that he would die before he embraced rationality.) And that final scene in the ambulance, where they’re both covered in mud and digestive enzyme and staring at each other in this harrowed way and then they reach out and hold hands…grotesque, maybe, but it wouldn’t have made for a bad final image.

No, “Field Trip” is the lone bright spot in the final weeks of Season Six, positively shining with glory if we put it up against “Milagro” (about which I have said too much already), “The Unnatural” (about which I will say nothing because I would not willingly hurt David Duchovny’s feelings), and “Three of a Kind.”

In fact, as awful in many ways as “Biogenesis” is, it’s really “Three of a Kind” that is the harbinger of doom:

 You were expecting, maybe, a picture of Scully, zonked to the gills on brainwashing juice, suggestively mouthing a cigarette while surrounded by white guys in suits who are just dying to drag her off someplace and take advantage of her impaired judgment? No; not this time. If you’ve read my reviews of “Small Potatoes” and “Bad Blood” and “Milagro” you know pretty much what I have to say about that. 

No, what makes “Three of a Kind” a prophet of doom is that it’s the ["Assignment: Earth"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/856342/chapters/1646420) of the X-Files. Diehard original series  _Star Trek_  fans will remember that the series was slated for cancellation after its second season. Gene Roddenberry, hoping to get a new series after this one folded, made a pilot for a show called  _Assignment: Earth,_ which would basically be a kind of combined ripoff of  _Doctor Who_ and the James Bond movies. He got the studio to pay for this pilot by disguising it as what could very well have been the final episode of  _Star Trek._ As the review linked above will tell you, one of the things I really hated about “Assignment: Earth” was the way Kirk and Spock were shoehorned into a plot that really had nothing to do with them, and in which they really had no role to play. They were stuck standing around in the background while Gary Seven and Roberta did all the cool stuff, because the point was no longer to give  _Star Trek_ a decent sendoff but to launch Gene’s new show. Alas for Gene, _Assignment: Earth_ was never picked up; but hooray for us, we got another season of  _Star Trek._

It was not a great season, though; and that’s largely because, as the studio gradually cut off its support, many of the writers, producers, and directors who had been there from the beginning started bailing. And the same thing is happening, for different reasons, at this point in  _The X-Files._

After  _The X-Files_ was up on its feet, Chris Carter started trying to capitalize it by launching other shows; and every time, he cannibalized some of the  _X-Files_ ' talent. James Wong and Glen and Darren Morgan were tapped as writers for  _Millennium,_ which launched in October 1996 just as  _The X-Files_ went into its fourth season. And you know…I tried to watch  _Millennium._ I did try. I couldn’t take it. The violence was 10X more gruesome, I got tired of all the serial killers, and most of all, I could not make myself take an interest in Frank Black. Evidently I was not alone on this one, because  _Millennium_ only lasted 3 series, and by May 1999 it was done—just at around the same time season 6 of the X-Files was limping to its conclusion. Undaunted, Carter launched  _Harsh Realm,_  a show about a soldier who becomes absorbed by a battle simulation game and has to bring down the evil force that has captured it or some shit like that.  _Harsh Realm_ launched at the same time as  _X-Files_ 's season 7. It lasted one season; but that was long enough to take up a lot of Vince Gilligan, Frank Spotnitz, and John Shiban's time, since all of them were recruited as producers. _  
_

And somewhere along the way, Carter got what might just be the worst idea he’d ever had: a spinoff featuring the Lone Gunmen.

"Three of a Kind" is, if not the actual pilot of that show, an exploration of the idea and an attempt to generate enthusiasm for it. For the same reason that Kirk and Spock’s part of "Assignment: Earth" is basically an embarrassment, Scully’s role in "Three of a Kind" is minimized in order to allow the Lone Gunmen to rule the school. That’s why she has to get whacked with bimbo juice almost as soon as she arrives; they have to put her out of commission or else there’s no room for the boys to operate. Instead, Suzanne Modeski (first introduced in season 5’s "Unusual Suspects") takes Scully’s place as the lady scientist for which all three of the boys are hot and with whom one of them is in love. 

And, you know, OK, it’s sort of cute…but anyone other than Chris Carter and his proteges could have looked at this episode and said to themselves, “There’s not enough here to build a show around.” Langley and Frohicke emerge from this episode no more complex than they ever were before. There’s an attempt at character development made with Byers; but frankly, that only makes it worse. His thing for Suzanne Modeski is presented, in the opening teaser, as a dream (or rather, fantasy); his winding up married to her is about as realistic as a timeline in which JFK was never shot and everything in the US is peace and harmony. But the episode then validates Byers’s fantasy romance with its characterization of Suzanne Modeski. In “Unusual Suspects,” she starts off by trying to con the LG into accessing classified files; eventually she comes clean about her role in the vast government conspiracy and they try to help her escape. She’s grateful for the help; but at no point in “Unusual Suspects” does it appear that she is developing a tender passion for Byers. And yet when she returns in “Three of a Kind,” and he starts acting like a cuckolded husband because she’s married to someone else, she takes him seriously. She seems to believe that she needs to explain. She says that although her husband was the one who saved her from the hell into which she is being abducted at the end of “Unusual Suspects,” Byers had the prior claim: “I wanted it to be you. I really, really wanted it to be you.” 

Where is this coming from? Male fantasy, that’s where; and that’s what  _The Lone Gunmen_ was going to be. A fantasy in which three aging geek boys get to play James Bond, Bond girls included. One of the other recurring characters was an enigmatic femme fatale named Yves Adele Harlow, and…well, I looked at some of the quotations involving her on the IMDB page, and it looks like the writers saw her as a great opportunity for boob jokes. I never saw an episode of  _The Lone Gunmen_ —it launched in the spring of 2001, about midway through season 8 of  _The X-Files,_ when I had already stopped watching the show. It ran for 13 episodes—most of them written by Carter, Spotnitz, Shiban, and Gilligan. The plug was pulled; and the cliffhanger ending had to be resolved in a season 9 episode of  _The X-Files,_ aptly titled “Jump the Shark.”

So what “Three of a Kind” tells us, among other things, is that starting in the late 90s the core crew responsible for getting  _The X-Files_ off the ground has started to get tired of making this show. You’d have to be pretty fucking tired to think that  _The Lone Gunmen_ was going to be a worthy successor to it; and you’d also have to totally fail to understand that the appeal of the show was centered in its representation of a mutual and mutually respectful partnership between a man and a woman. In “Three of a Kind,” when Byers decides to bring in Scully to find out what’s going on with Suzanne Modeski, Langley asks, “Why do you want just Scully?” Byers replies that Mulder is “too high profile” and “virtually a household name” to the guys out to get Suzanne.

OK. Mulder was involved in the first Suzanne caper. Still. Did I hear you say… _just_ Scully? Did I hear you imply that nobody in black-ops land knows who the fuck Special Agent Dana Scully is? What neophyte no-talent who’s had his head up his ass for the past six seasons wrote this piece of…

Oh. I see this episode was written by Vince Gilligan and John Shiban.

ARGH.

Anyway, my point is: “Three of a Kind” is only one of many indications that the original leadership has pretty much checked out before it’s time to launch the new mythology arc with “Biogenesis.” And that perhaps is why “Biogenesis” just stops making sense entirely. Scully’s voiceover, which begins at the freaking dawn of time, is a reboot not just of the mythology but of life on earth; and the story that follows enters into this weirdly religious mode in which now, instead of uncovering a human conspiracy, Mulder and Scully will apparently be searching for the key to the origin of all life on this planet and human life in particular. The book of Genesis has appeared, carved into an alien spacecraft, in Navajo, in radioactive material which spins around and flies across the room when it’s excited. And suddenly Scully is wandering around in Africa while Mulder is banging himself around in a padded cell and Krychek appears out of nowhere and hey! Krichgau is back and I’m not surprised that Mulder’s finally lost his mind because really, in the world that begins with “Biogensis,” you may as well just GO crazy. Everything else has. 

And that’s partly because the show is now in the process of being colonized by all the ideas left over from all the shows Carter has tried and failed to get off the ground. In poker terms, instead of folding and walking away from a bad hand, what Carter does in the X-Files' last few seasons is keep betting on ideas that have already been rejected by the viewing public.  “Biogenesis” smells a lot like  _Millennium,_ with its fascination with Biblical texts and its belief in magic and its crazy people running around spouting cryptic prophecies and the Apocalypse wait I'm getting ahead of myself in to "The Sixth Extinction" but it's all just one big ball of vaguely mystical nonsensically plotted millenarian moonshine. Frank Black and the Millennium Group will actually take over one X-Files episode in season seven (“Millennium.”) Making the X-Files the repository for his own lost apocryphal dreams really pushes the show in a different direction. It’s one thing to be searching for the truth about what your own government is doing; it’s another to be trying to find the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. 

Ah well. Onward to the next season. Looks like it’s gonna be a long one.


End file.
